Heritage

I want to write something about my father out of respect and love for him. It isn’t easy to do so without feeling somewhat hypocritical because I have not been very close to him, geographically speaking, since leaving home in 1965. This estrangement puzzles me because my father had always set an example of an honest, loving and kind, integrity that was never a reason for me to stay at such a distance my whole adult life. Frankly, I left home to find my fortune… and when I failed at that again and again… time rolled out and away the years.

When we pass, we leave a heritage of a life well lived or one of no consequence whatsoever. There are those who would have mausoleums built in their honor to secure a place marking their spot here for as long as possible. Life is a pissing game for some… marking territory… and death is but an extension of the pissing game played all of our lives. Libraries, foundations, endowments, pyramids (great and small)… all left to live on. Folks like my father left a heritage without having to go through all of that nonsense. It is a heritage of the simplicity of love that is passed on through his children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren and so on and on… so much greater than any monument of stone. I am most certainly blessed to live and to do my best to pass on his wealth of virtue… our family’s inheritance.

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War & Peace

War & Peace

How do you view competition in business, politics, and our personal lives?

… We have to consider our idea of happiness. Even if you are successful in making more money as you do, but you still suffer. Maybe your competition doesn’t make as much money as you do, but they are happier. So you choose to be happy or have or have the other kind of success?

Thich Nhat Hanh;

You Have the Buddha in You,

Interview with Andrea Miller:

Shambala Sun Magazine: Jan 2014

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I have Buddhist sentiments but my heart doesn’t resonate with every interpretation of the Buddha’s teachings. I’m thinking that my mind will change with the practice of mindfulness, but there are things going on in the world that are not conducive to reason. Thich Nhat Hanh was one of the monks in Vietnam who protested that war using peaceful means: I agree with that tactic. However, I’m not convinced that peaceful protest works universally in the here and now. The Mullahs that would condemn a woman to being stoned are difficult to convince peacefully.

There are those who are born warriors. War is, in spite of its brutality, a delicate tool to use against the kind of ignorance that would fly an airliner filled with innocent passengers into a tall building occupied with equally innocent workers. That kind of political fanaticism needs to be dealt with forcefully, with the immediacy of the here and now, and that is what warriors were born to do.

War is a horrible thing, it should not be left to amateurs or shouldn’t always be the first response. There are innocents involved and force is best used surgically; taking out those who wouldn’t be responsive to reason. But military force alone solves nothing without being accompanied with compassion and diplomacy for the sake of those defeated. Victory parades should resemble funeral marches. Reconstruction ought to follow the destruction of war with as much commitment in effort and money to that as the nation’s commitment to war.

Peaceful protest raises our consciousness and therefore serves a purpose for the future’s sake. Buddhist monks burned themselves in public during the Vietnam War to no apparent and immediate effect. The lives of those monks seemed wasted as the War ground on. And the results of victory by the Viet Cong were as disastrous as the American intervention to civilians and soldiers alike. Because the War had no real strategy to win, there was confusion and doubt on the home front. Lives were wasted irresponsibly to no end in sight because Americans never took war as seriously as the Viet Cong did. Peaceful protest played a role but would not have had any real impact had the war been conducted as war and not as a political opportunity for charletins.

We live in a hazardous world where we can, with a flick of a switch, annihilate all traces of civilization. Total war is inconceivable to most but, to the Mullahs who strive against the West, it is a means to an end and that end is The End. I am perplexed because no apparent solution reveals itself to me. These are times the require balance and focus relying on the guidance of a Power greater than myself before I jump on any bandwagon.

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Religion/Discipline/Spirituality

A UNIVERSAL SEARCH

Puleeeeze!

Be quick to see where religious people are right. Make use of what they offer.

ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS, p. 87

I do not claim to have all the answers in spiritual matters, any more than I claim to have all the answers about alcoholism. There are others who are also engaged in a spiritual search, if I keep an open mind about what others have to say, I have much to gain. My sobriety is greatly enriched, and my practice of the Eleventh Step more fruitful, when I use both the literature and the practices of my Judeo-Christian tradition, and the resources of other religions. Thus, I receive support from many sources in staying away from the first drink.

DAILY REFLECTIONS, p. 337

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The word, religion, translates as, a spiritual discipline: one becomes a disciple of a person that embodies a spiritual concept (or simply the spiritual concept itself). When I used to say, “I’m not religious, I’m spiritual,” what I was actually admitting was that I had no discipline about my spirituality.  This was, by definition, not true if, in fact, I did have a practice I followed through with. Was I cutting my way through the jungle, trying to get to the mountaintop, without a map or taking any well-trod path? In this context, one might say that AA is a religion, though it claims not to be.

            AA has a discipline outlined in the Twelve Steps… a dharma, if you like, but I have come to believe that, for all practical purposes, I ought to drop the use of the word religion altogether. I do so because the word, religion, is confused at times with what we know of as “organized religion”. So, what is wrong about an organized spiritual discipline if the ultimate goal is to harm no one? I have even dropped the word God in exchange for a description of what is called God. By calling God, the Heart of Compassion, I cut through the baggage of the word God because I surely don’t wish to turn anyone away from the boundless treasure I have found on the way to the Heart of Compassion.

            Another part of this reflection was about AA not having all the answers in regards to alcoholism. The practice takes me to a vantage point where I can see that AA is but one path out of many. It has proven to be most effective for me but for others it just might not work. Every human being is an individual and I have found through the years that it is futile to try to cookie-stamp anyone into my way of believing. Worse than futile and counterproductive, it is destructive and doesn’t help at all on any level. This goes for my attitude about drinking. There are people who can smoke pot or have a few cocktails at the end of their day and it harms no one. Who am I to say that this is wrong? Just because I can no longer imbibe doesn’t mean that I have to demand anyone else ought to get on the sobriety bandwagon. Some of the best people I know smoke a joint, enjoy a drink, even get drunk, once in a while. Who am I to take away their pleasure or look down my nose at them?

            The idea here is that I mind my own business and try to be as helpful as I can towards anyone who wants what I have found. It is as simple as this, keep it simple and mind my own business.

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Fifty Years Ago

Fifty years ago, November 22^nd … I was in my High School art class taking a clumsy stab at portraiture. I had chosen two pictures: one of JFK and the other, Abraham Lincoln. I admit now that I wasn’t doing a very good job of it… just couldn’t get it right. The school intercom interrupted, announcing that the President had been shot. His condition was unknown and that all students were to return to their home-rooms. I was stunned… if that is the right word for it… I had a knee-jerk reflex… “Nixon did it!” I said out loud and immediately sensed the ridiculousness of my accusation.

It was shock… I hadn’t been so shocked until 9/11. Some of us, myself included, were openly crying. My shock turned to grief: the sorrow was so profound. Though the impact of it was equaled by 9/11, the quality of the sorrow transcended anything I have felt since. Of course, the assassinations Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were significant but I had become so much more cynical by then. As a nation we were so much more innocent.

Some of the students couldn’t handle the grief and had done as I had at first, they responded with accusation. A girl at the front of the class said, “The communists did it.”

A jock opined, “No, it was a “n” that done it.”

Another said it was likely a Dixi-crat.

My grief called me out of shock, and frankly, I am most proud of my little speech I cried out from the back of the room, “He was not shot by anyone but us. We killed him with our intolerance! We killed him with our ignorance! Sure as shit it wasn’t anyone else that killed him!”

You could have heard a mouse fart it was so quiet. I had my audience so I added one more thing in my diatribe, “Now, shut the fuck up and cry for yourselves.”

I still feel that way when I hear conspiracy theories and I can’t watch the plethora of programs devoted to the subject played on TV, ad infinitum, the last week no matter how objective or sincere the production might be. Just like 9/11, ignorance propelled some of us into wild hysteria by ego-tripping A-holes. Anger and ignorance rules where sanity is abandoned. I believe it doesn’t matter who acts out in such a way as to take out a leader or smash our consciousness with extreme acts of nihilism. We will never find out exactly what happened in Dallas that day… we won’t find out for sure. There are assassinations going back to Roman times that have never been fully explained. What is most important isn’t about who did what to whom… but rather, how does our emotional response affect us and our so-called solutions? How much are we going to give up our civil liberties as a result of our anger and fears?

The world we live in today would have been unimaginable on that day in Dallas. From gun-control to the “War on Drugs”… from Homeland Security, to a simple matter of a national ID card… how much are we willing to give up when it would have been better to feel the grief and process it before running in circles like a headless chicken?

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Relax and Breathe

There are times as I look back on my life with all its flips and flops and feel nothing but regret for how much time I have wasted in fear and resentment. I look back at other times with pride for the smallest accomplishments. It seems to me that neither of these perspectives are objective and can’t be analyzed without some sort of distancing or elevation. I have to take the time to sit with myself. Meditation is often thought of as meditating on an ideal, a word, or mantra. But the most effective practice I have found for the distancing is simply to relax. The Little Red Book (published by Hazelden) speaks of this on page 106:

We attempt to momentarily suspend all mental and physical activity. We try to relax our entire bodies, then close our minds to the worries and anxieties about us.

            What do we think about? Just relaxation. Then we let go of our cares and turn to God with this simple prayer: Thy Will Be Done.
When i do that "Something tells me I'm onto something good..."

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Walking

Walking the spiritual path properly is a very subtle process; it is not something to jump into naivety. There are numerous sidetracks which lead to a distorted, ego-centered version of spirituality; we can deceive ourselves into thinking we are developing spiritually when instead we are strengthening our egocentricity through spiritual techniques. This fundamental distortion may be referred to as spiritual materialism.

Chogyam Trungpa;

Cutting through

Spiritual Materialism

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When in doubt… go to compassion. Compassion moves on self-centeredness in ways that becoming a spiritual technician cannot. The idea that I can somehow fix the mess I got myself into by mastering a technique is fine for normal folks but, for my kind, it is often a fatal deception. It is a fatal deception because I can become convinced that I am doing this bit on my own… even when I am doing “good deeds”. This is where the subtlety that Chogyam Trungpa speaks of, that he calls spiritual materialism, can lead me astray. Kindness of heart is achieved by tapping into the source of kindness. True compassion arises out of unity with the Heart of Compassion. Unity with the Heart of Compassion happens the same way any creative relationship works. A creative relationship works when one partner is in love with the other and wants nothing more than the other’s happiness. It is a mutual trust and caring for each individual. The vehicle of surrender; the opening of heart, one to another, compels me to kindness. It is within the Heart of Compassion that the power of virtue radiates. No longer is it my will… but Thine be done.

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Snapped a Picture

I didn’t take a picture of the sunrise today. I watched the sunrise. I couldn’t take a picture of the coffee’s aroma I enjoyed brewing.

I took a picture years ago, like so many before and after, stored it in a box and hoped to put it in an album for memory’s sake. I went through one of those boxes… so many wondrous moments… dear people… precious sunrises… snapped a picture… walked away… put it in a box.

The only pics that bring back those instances, and loved ones, are the times I paused and appreciated... at the click… the strobe flash... the nano-second of time passed... sealed them in the heart to love and hold... the smile... the grace of a glance... the dancer's leap... the crimson glow of light flickering off the leaves at sunset... ahhh.

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Breathing In and Breathing Out

Breathing in, taking on the sorrow

And breathing out bliss, I pause.

Breathing in, taking on the bliss,

And breathing out peace, I rest.

Breathing in, taking on peace,

And breathing out emptiness, I sit

Breathing in, taking on emptiness,

And breathing out emptiness, is all there is.

All there is, is breathing in and out

All there is.

Breathing in and out all there is,

I am Dancing.

Dancing, I am dancing,

With the rhythms of Wonder.

With the rhythms of wonder,

The drumbeat of The Heart of Compassion

Resounds in mine and I sit.

Breathing in, taking on the sorrow

And breathing out bliss, I pause,

Again and again and again and again.

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To Be Revealed

Because in our culture we overvalue the intellect, we imagine that to become enlightened demands extraordinary intelligence. In fact, many kinds of cleverness are just further obscurations. There is a Tibetan saying; “If you are too clever, you could miss the point entirely.”

            Patrul Rinpoche said: “The logical mind seems interesting, but it is the seed of delusion.” People can become obsessed with their own theories and miss the point of everything. In Tibet we say:                                “Theories are like patches on a coat, one day they wear off.”

Glimpse After Glimpse

Sogyal Rinpoche

& 

There are those in AA that say: “Most of us are too smart to stay sober. We have to be dumbed-down to get it.” I have found that nothing obstructs spiritual progress more than intellectual arrogance. However, this doesn't mean I don’t use that product of millions of years of evolution behind my eyes and between my ears for nothing. It takes some training, but the intellect is able to function best when it is sidestepped and put in proper order. It is when I try to make sense of this business that the sense of it evades me. I don’t hold on to my ideas as fervently as I once did. My point of view has been blunted by the grinding wheel of experience. It has been tremendously liberating to be free of my own contrivances. Once, free of my opinions, I am able to say honestly what I know as opposed to what I have theories of.

Nietzsche wrote these controversial words in the very beginning of Thus Spoke Zarathustra: “For God is dead and his sinners died with him. The only sin now is to esteem the entrails of the unknowable more than the meaning of the Earth.”

Everyone gets hung up on those three words, “God is dead,” and avoid what the meaning of the Earth might be. It is what in front of me I can know in the here and now that warrants a higher priority, leaving the rest to be put on the shelf labeled “to be revealed.”

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Dig the Pond

Dig the pond, don't wait for the moonlight; when the pond is complete, the moonlight will naturally be there.

Hung-Chih; Five Houses of Zen

Veterans Day

Pause…. Take a deep breath today for the men and women who put a thorn in the hand of fascism during WWII. Take another deep breath for our fathers, uncles, aunts, brothers and sisters... high school pals and so on, who have stood ground in faraway places on our behalf. They didn’t stand for a piece of dirt: they stood, whether they knew it or not, for us and our values.

When I came back from four years of service during the conflict in Vietnam, I complained to my dad, “At least your war was justified and you took out Hitler.”

His answer bothered me greatly at the time. He said he knew nothing of Hitler. He joined the army during the depression and the army was a job. After working in the CCC he was glad to be getting a check ($25 a month to start, I believe).

I do know he learned of Hitler. I remembered a tall German Pretzel can full of Reich Marks and medals. In that can was one more thing… a photograph of a pile of corpses, stacked like firewood. It was Buchenwald. He said he learned of Hitler there as the troops ushered the town’s people through that camp.

My dad came home and worked hard to make a good life for his family. He never complained or rarely spoke of the war at all. His Eisenhower jacket (with medals and a 3rd Army patch) and an occasional reminiscence with his hunting buddies at the campfire was all there was.

Though Veterans Day is a holiday, it isn’t a holiday in the usual sense in that it is a day of respect. Respect for those who stand, or stood, in faraway places like the Ardennes Forest like my dad. My generation did the same in the rice paddies of Southeast Asia and our present generation is mired in Iraq and Iran. Today, we honor those who didn’t come back for whatever reason.

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TAXI REFLECTIONS: Bringing the Mind Back Home

TAXI REFLECTIONS: Bringing the Mind Back Home: Meditation is bringing the mind back home, and this is first achieved through the practice of mindfulness.             Once an old woman ...

Bringing the Mind Back Home

Meditation is bringing the mind back home, and this is first achieved through the practice of mindfulness.

            Once an old woman came to Buddha and asked him how to meditate. He told her to remain aware of every movement of her hands as she drew water from the well, knowing that if she did, she would soon find herself in that state of alert and spacious calm that is meditation.

Glimpse After Glimpse,

Sogyal Rinpoche

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The idea of meditation is to become mindful and being mindful can’t be done by ignoring the little things. Ignoring the little things can lead me off the path into all sorts of delusional behaviors steeped in neurosis. Neurotic behaviors are those that are behaviors which are blinded by a selfish determination to control everything around me. This insensitivity… this unawareness, is based on fear and grasping for the past or the future. Being aware now… in the here and now, translates into being awake and not in a trance as we often think of what we do when we meditate. My experience with meditation isn’t about magic tricks; mindfulness is about conscious contact with all and everything: the Heart of Compassion. I have no problem with other forms of meditation… with other creeds or forms of prayer: if one wishes to levitate and do other fantastic things, this is fine with me. However, once I found myself in a desperate bind, I needed to have conscious contact with a Power sufficient to lift me out of the morass that had rendered me powerless. As the gospel verse goes: “When no one else could help, God lifted me.”

    Heaven isn't a place beyond my reach as a reward for righteousness. Nirvana is always present withing my own heart. When I meditate and become completely absorbed in mindfulness, I am back home where I belong.

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Tell Us Something

Heart of Compassion; please tell us something that we can believe.

Please tell us something fantastic that we can believe.

Please tell us something that will give us hope.

Please tell us something fantastic that will give us hope.

Please tell us something that will grant us joy.

Please tell us something fantastic that will grant us joy.

Please tell us something that will chase all doubt away.

Please tell us something fantastic that will chase all doubt away.

Please tell us something that will unify our spirit with yours.

Please tell us something fantastic that will unify our spirit with yours.

Please tell me something that will reach inside my heart so that it resonates with yours.

Please tell us something that will reach inside our hearts so that it resonates with yours.

Please tell me something fantastic that will reach inside my heart so that it resonates with yours.

Heart of Compassion; I will do something today with your power, your love, and your way of life.

Heart of Compassion; I will do something small and humble with your power, your love, and your way of life.

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TAXI REFLECTIONS: Triggers

TAXI REFLECTIONS: Triggers: Is karma really so hard to see in operation? Don’t we only have to look back at our own lives to see clearly the consequences of some of ou...

Triggers

Is karma really so hard to see in operation? Don’t we only have to look back at our own lives to see clearly the consequences of some of our actions? When we upset or hurt someone, didn’t it rebound on us? Were we not left with a dark and bitter memory, and the shadows of self-disgust? That memory and those shadows are karma, the results of our past actions, words, and thoughts. If we examine our actions, and become really mindful of them, we will see that there is a pattern that repeats itself. Whenever we act negatively, it leads to pain and suffering, whenever we act positively, it eventually results in happiness.

Glimpse After Glimpse,

Sogyal Rinpoche

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Does karma mean that the harm done to me in the past is unchangeable? If my old tapes rule my life, am I stuck with the karma I’ve acquired over a lifetime? I am careful of how I look at a lifetime of negative words, actions, and thoughts. Can flipping them to the positive be enough to turn my karma around into a better direction? These things are hard to discern, depending on how I perceive the past from where I sit in the present. I can see two distinct ways to look at the problem of karma: one is to look at it loaded with nostalgia. Nostalgia is a tricky thing. It can fool me into longing for the joys and regretting the sorrows of the past. The other way of looking at karma is a rigorously honest self-examination. Sometimes this takes help because I can be blinded and side-tracked by nostalgia and get stuck in remorse. I have witnessed far too many of the people I have worked with“triggered” when they approach the Fourth Step of AA. The Fourth Step is the one where a thorough inventory is taken and, on the Fifth Step, we share what is found there with another human being. Sometimes these two steps ought to be done together. with the help of someone who can be trusted and who is knowledgeable about how to direct the karma so that it can be disposed of. One of my favorite people, Big Al, used to say, “Take the bullet out of the gun and the trigger has no power.” At any rate, it is damned near impossible to do this effectively on my own and that is why most AA’s insist that we work the Steps with a trusted sponsor.

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Erroneous Views

Erroneous views keep us in defilement

While right views remove us from it.

But when we are in a position to discard both of them

We are then absolutely pure.

The Sutra of Hui Neng

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Before I do anything I make sure that anything I do doesn’t do me. Taken down the stream of righteousness into the morass of morality; where one is bad and the other is good; one is healthy and one is unhealthy, I become a helpless pawn to anything suggested by bad comb-overs. My heart breaks when I see so many good intentions taken and used to wrap coils of restraints on anything that moves; anything that moves spiritually or socially in the politics of religion. Driven by fear… fear blocking… barring… the simplicity of looking inside… from not listening… to ignoring the Christ that abides… to the Buddha within… from not finding my own center... I am driven with a separation of the heart from the computer between my ears and behind my eyes. This can be overcome so simply and so easily by sitting after an even simpler checklist… sitting… breathing… letting the Heart of Compassion rise from the ravenous gut to the ever chattering brain… uniting them…. Letting all concepts of right and wrong drop to the floor like so much excrement. Liberty… that is what I find… liberty to act and think with a clear head and heart full of compassion… I move from the darkness into the light.

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Bambi is Venison

It takes the wildman in me to accept some of what goes down everywhere.
The wildman accepts the lion that eats the antelope.
The antelope accepts the grass that is eaten.
The grass that is eaten by the antelope
devours the earth and rain with abandon.

Would the turkey breast meat I consumed this morning on a bagel, compressed and deli-sliced to appear like ham, be any happier if it was from a pig rather than a bird? Do I feel better about eating range-free fed sirloin steak than veal? Do I feel better about the eggs, from range free hens, I ate this morning too?

If all the people who oppose guns would accept that a hunter is on a higher moral plane than those who by their meat wrapped and packaged already butchered out of their sight then they might have a point.

We are animals that eat animals. Bambi is venison and Porky Pig makes for good sausage. Should I then feel guilty that Charlie the Tuna wants to be eaten?

Children should write the Animal Bill of Rights.

A child at the zoo asked, as we paused at the cage where the chimps were housed, "What did he do wrong to go to jail?"
"He just got caught."
"Is it wrong to get caught?"
"Yes."
"Oh, I get it. That's why my dad is in prison. He just got caught."

Focusing and Listening

There is a direct linkage among self-examination, meditation and prayer. Taken separately, these practices can bring much relief and benefit.

TWELVE STEPS AND TWELVE TRADITIONS p. 98

If I do my self-examination first, then surely, I’ll have enough humility to pray and meditate --- because I’ll see and feel my need for them…

…No matter how or where I start, I eventually arrive at my destination: a better life.

From: DAILY MEDITATIONS, p. 316

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“A better life…” What is a better life if, before we started our adventure, our lives weren’t that bad? Why bother if I have everything I need or want and my life is going well enough for me? Some launch out on this quest out of a desire for life after death: a heaven of sorts, whether that is the streets of gold or the fear of hell of an unknown karma. My intention, when I sit, is to make conscious contact with the Heart of Compassion because that is what completes the circle within which my life takes on the mantel of grace. The direct result of prayer is preparation for meditation. Meditation might prepare me for an unknown future but I can’t bother myself thinking about that. When I sit I give only a part of it to concentration on my body and my breath… about 25%. And I give about that much to prayer. 50%; therefore, goes to pure meditation where the gates are opened to inspiration. I get out of the way and, when the monkey chatter returns, it is important that I go back to my breathing. As I take this adventure, the chatter slows down and I spend more of the time in blissful peace between thoughts.

            Now, this “better life” business doesn’t matter either. In that space between breathing and thinking it all goes away and I abide within the wonder of creation. It is an adventure more than a practice… brave and wise Odysseus on a venture through the hazards and joy of the journey home.

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Shedding the Ego

In becoming an enlightened being, this does not destroy the living being, or take it away, or lose it; nevertheless, it does mean having shed it.

Dōgen; Rational Zen

I take that the living being is another way to say the ego. I have attended sessions where folks talk about crushing, smashing, and destroying the ego. Nonsense! Isn’t it better not to set myself up for failure than to attempt somehow to come to some sort of agreement with it by letting go of it?Just the act of trying to destroy the ego is a form of self-righteousness that leads to all sorts of abuses of power... not to mention abuses of my material body. Using doctrine, or a set of oughts and ought nots, I can pick up the mantel of a cause and with the arrogance of a true believer completely disregarding the opinions and beliefs of others. Yes, even as I am writing, I’m thinking of others out of the loop on this, erroneously believing it isn’t about me. But it is. Shedding the ego can be the simple act of being kind and understanding to others even when they are nasty and vindictive about my core beliefs. We pray that our President and Congress would come to some sort of understanding on this before the nation sinks into a morass we can’t get out of.

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Are You Serious?

Taking life seriously does not mean spending our whole lives meditating as if we were living in the Himalaya Mountains or in the old days in Tibet. In the modern world, we work to earn our living, but we should not get entangled in a nine-to-five existence, where we live without any view of the deeper meaning of life.

            Our task is to strike a balance, to find a middle way, to learn not to overextend ourselves with extraneous activities and preoccupations, but to simplify our lives more and more. The key to finding a happy balance in modern life is simplicity.

                                                                                                                              Glimpse After Glimpse,

Sogyal Rinpoche

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Everything in moderation doesn’t translate to giving up my passion. It is a mistake to think that life and art are separate entities. Life and art grow from each other in the same manner that grass needs water and soil. My heart needs inspiration lest I fall into mediocrity. It is a error, in my opinion, to dismiss our passion thinking that spirituality is about chasing guru’s or seminars. Once you get it, you get it… it is then time to move on. I loved the period of time I lived on the mesa above Arroyo Hondo New Mexico with a group of brave explorers of a higher consciousness. Those days have passed and they can no longer be recovered. I won’t go to Tibet and New Mexico is out of the question for now. Love holds me here in Santa Barbara but that doesn’t mean that I have to sink into the granola spirituality of Southern California. We take a hard-core look at work and play… Commitment to craft and excitement in play make for a grand life. My aim today is to live a grand life where play and work cannot be distinguished from each other. Even if that work would seem to be below me, I have given myself and my time to it. Why not have some fun doing it? It is AA’s rule 62: Don’t take yourself so damned seriously.

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